From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

Forget the movie, forget handsome sexy Burt Lancaster and beauteous Deborah Kerr canoodling on the sand, forget another awful acting performance by ham-actor Frank Sinatra (“Watch out for Fatso!”, oh, puh-leeze), forget the overmelodramatization by director Fred Zinnemann, this book is full of violence, boredom, drunkenness, suicide, gambling, whoring, existential crises, self-loathing, ugliness, and degradation in Hawai’i in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. And it’s long, 850 pages of the stuff, with an unrelenting style of malleable words in its narrative and dialogue. Reminded me a bit of Celine, unmitigated pressure, a cross between hell and purgatory set against the backdrop of paradise in the Hawaiian Islands. If Jones didn’t have Dante in mind when he wrote this, I’d be surprised. In fact, the irony of it all is that the attack on Pearl Harbor, which leads to war, also leads to an apotheosis of sorts. War is hell? Nah, pre-war is hell.

Harold Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, an editor and translator.